Business Growth on a Budget
There are very few articles that can be written to explain specifically how your company should market your product or service, create opportunities, win business and manage your reputation and growth.
Speaking from experience, every company is different. Because each company has it’s own brand, positioning, competition, price point, prospects and industry to work through. There are also different ways and methods and processes that work well for certain kinds of products and services and not others. To add to the complexity, there are different levels of sales and different marketing models depending on what level of sales you are at (i.e. $5MM vs. $30MM vs. funded start-up all have different marketing tactics).
Even companies within the same industry could have totally different marketing approaches. Prospects that ask us, “what experience do you have in our industry?” would ask a better qualifying question if they asked, “what experience do you have in the planning of a marketing model that strategically fits our circumstances?”
Okay that said, here are some key starting points for strategic planning.
- Product or service: Who will want to buy it? What data supports this?
- Price point: Is it value-priced or luxury-priced?
- Positioning: Competition, strengths and weaknesses
- Perception: Reputation, Opportunities, Defensible positions
- Partners: How can they be leveraged?
- Parameters: How simple or complex is the product or service?
- Players: Who will lead the marketing decisions client-side?
- Player’s Money: What kind of budget is set aside for the effort?
Asking tough questions help move the strategic marketing plan from concept into reality. Strategic marketing and determining how to grow your business is a lot like selecting stocks. The more we know about your firm, the better we can anticipate issues before they arise, proactively open a market you may not yet be in, or build your advertising, brand reputation, or distribution channel.
A strategic plan is built around sales goals for each market segment you want to be in. The plan may be complex so it should be built around a workable and realistic calendar not only for the marketing campaign, but also to put it in action and then measure the results.
Now comes the tactics. The tactics are the specific items within each market that will support the sales goals for each market segment or demographic. As a simple example, direct mail will yield 2% when it is mailed cold to a broad audience. Conversely it will yield, we’ve seen as high as 35% return under the right conditions, market and message. However, either way, there is an investment in printing, postage, etc. This too has efficiencies, such as a campaign, or product samples, or partnering with someone already sending or delivering a complimentary service or product to your prospects.
We could also make a sweeping generalization about the web: that your return-on-investment (ROI) is pennies on the dollar compared with printed media. And many companies can benefit in many ways because of this. But the web is huge, in terms of opportunities and marketing tactics you could try.
Your messages and your branding, including your graphic and web site design and how your prospects experience your brand will undoubtedly affect how successful you will be on-line, or off-line.
Without knowing you, the reader, and your business, you can see our dilemma answering the difficult question of “How to Grow Your Business on a Budget”.
The answer is in the custom phases. Research. Planning. Strategy. Calendar. Execution. Measure Results.
Call us at More Cabbage if we can help. If you’re in the Dallas area, or perhaps Southern California, we are happy to come by and make some cursory assessments of your business growth and marketing at no cost. We would ask though, that you are at a level of sales that requires a minimum of $50K per year to spend on marketing projects.
Many companies start with a few prospect relationships and a little bit of seed capital. We’ll talk to you too…let’s just open a dialogue on producing more cabbage.
